Guto Harri, director of communications at News UK, tells the remarkable story of a forgotten Welsh reporter and his greatest scoop, the subject of the first programme in a new documentary series on S4C

Journalist Gareth Jones in Borubodur, where he exposed the famine ravaging Stalin's Soviet Union to be hailed the "unsung hero of the Ukraine"

Journalism, at its best, takes you to the most interesting place at the most interesting time with the most interesting people, and gives you a chance to share that experience with as large an audience as possible.

The 27-year-old state-educated Welsh-speaker from Barry was doing pretty well, therefore, when he found himself sitting next to Joseph Goebbels flying over Berlin in 1933. Across the aisle was Adolf Hitler, en route to a gathering in Frankfurt very similar to that rally in Nuremberg that has haunted the world ever since.

“If the aeroplane should crash,” he wrote, “the whole history of Germany would change.”

Gareth Jones recorded his reflections in a soft, black, pocket-size diary which is now stored at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. Reading it gave me a chill, and rifling through a treasure chest of other letters, diaries and notebooks took me as close as I’ll ever get to the most turbulent events of the 20th century.

Tune into S4C at 8pm this Sunday and you’ll see footage of our Barry boy with the Fuhrer. You can also join us as we follow in his footsteps to the scene of his greatest scoop, in what was once known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union – the Ukraine.

Eight decades before the current chaos in that patch, Gareth Jones uncovered a famine of horrendous scale. Estimates vary, but there’s a broad consensus now that at least six million people died. Memorials – erected since the fall of the USSR – refer to the “Holodomor” (extermination by hunger). For many Ukrainians it was a deliberate act of political genocide, not an accident of nature.

As the brilliant Ben McIntyre recently reflected in The Times: “This is a story of brutal aggression in the Ukraine, media manipulation by Moscow and the bravery of a journalist prepared to face kidnapping and death in pursuit of an inconvenient truth. It is the story of Russian despotism, Ukrainian nationalism and journalistic ethics.”

Gareth Jones discovered the truth about the Holodomor and tried to tell the world about it with a rare combination of first-class journalistic skill, courage and determination. A brilliant linguist who graduated from Aberystwyth to read Russian at Cambridge, he took a long-distance train from Moscow and jumped off in what reporters would commonly regard today as a prohibited zone.

With a top production team from Tinopolis, I retraced his steps, trying to imagine what it would have been like alone, in the 1930s, with snow on the ground, a chronic shortage of food and Stalin in charge.

We met survivors, still living in grim poverty, though grateful to be alive having witnessed such horror.

Guto Harri, left, and crew filming in Ukraine

Lydia Marenkova, now 86, told us how a neighbour, thought to have starved to death, was thrown into a mass grave. She climbed out overnight.

And Anastasia Oleksienko, 91, recalled how her uncle encouraged her and her siblings to flee the village in case she was eaten by the desperately hungry nearby. What she saw has never left her – people screaming for bread before dropping dead.

Others told us how people scavenged for grass, nettles and roots in the aftermath of Stalin’s brutal experiment with so-called collective farming.

As a former journalist, fortunate enough to have travelled the world with the BBC, I was fascinated to discover what a young man, who grew up just miles from where I spent my early childhood, managed to achieve on that heroic, though arguably insane, excursion.

His reports were rubbished by the spoonfed brigade reporting from Moscow, and he gained the noble if hazardous distinction of being blacklisted by the Soviet intelligence service, the OGPU.

But more than 80 years on, Dr Vasily Marochko, chairman of the Association of Holodomor Researchers, told us that there is a groundswell of support for officially honouring Gareth Jones again for what he did – he was posthumously awarded the Ukrainian Order of Merit in 2008 – though the ongoing turbulence has put those moves on hold.

It was shocking, having filmed in a peaceful Kharkiv and Kiev last year, to see the terrifying escalation into riots, death and gross instability. I remember being troubled by the massive memorial to Lenin in the heart of Kharkiv and the cold communist architecture drowning the rare structural survivors of a more creative age.

There were hints, even then, that Mother Russia still cast a cloud over her former Soviet satellite on the Black Sea. And the events captured in this documentary will resonate more loudly in view of what’s happened in the more recent past.

Beyond that scoop, join us to hear more about a remarkable Welshman, who seemed unstoppable whatever his aim. I remember being terrified when I arrived at Oxford from my comprehensive outside Cardiff. Gareth Jones took Cambridge by storm and seemed to join the establishment ranks in an instant, becoming an aide to the greatest politician of the century, Lloyd George.

He made it in New York and it was a joy to retrace his steps in a city I have loved ever since a two-year posting as a television journalist.

Gareth seemed equally capable of effortlessly charming the more rooted residents of West Wales, where he briefly retreated after his foreign forays. Last week at the Hay Festival, I met relatives proud of their connection to him and curious about what we found.

What we cannot explain is Gareth Jones’ sudden and premature death. He died at the hands of bandits, on the distant borders of Mongolia, on the eve of his 30th birthday. Was this a random, rare misfortune? Or did Stalin have him followed to the ends of the Earth to be assassinated, as Trotsky was with an icepick in Mexico?

That seems far-fetched. But a more pedestrian explanation for such an extraordinary man seems somehow unworthy. Lloyd George left us an intriguing clue when he described Gareth as “y gwr oedd yn gwybod gormod” – the man who knew too much.

Sadly, we know too little of him. Hopefully this first episode in this new series Gohebwyr (Reporters) will help put that right.

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